Every year, I get to spend four days with visual practitioners from all over the world. It’s my time to reconnect with old friends, make new connections, learn more skills, and deepen my thinking on the work that we do. I was inspired by colleagues, a new organizational development track, and external speakers like Scott McCloud and Lisa Key Solomon that took us beyond our field. And this year, I put my markers down and focused on deeply listening, connecting, and experiencing. Following our closing circle activity, here are words that I heard from the week that will make a huge impact on my work.

This year, I was excited to lead two workshops at IFVP 2016 in Washington, D.C. with long-time friend and thinking partner, Lynn Carruthers.

Tackling Our Mindset has been a listening/self-reflection model I’ve been working on for the past year. Deeply influenced by Otto Scharmer’s Theory U, Kelvy Bird’s whole listening approach, and the leadership/generative dialogue work of the Trium Group , the model provides a way to understand and focus our listening filters as graphic facilitators. Are we aware of our dominant listening filters? How can we be more intentional about the filters we use? And then, how do we develop our listening filters into our competency? In the next week, I’ll post a more detailed summary of the session walking through the model and how to use it for yourself.

Designing Visual Templates was a workshop Lynn and I designed for facilitators five years ago. In any shape or form, templates are a tool to guide participants through a process or conversation. During the session, we displayed a gallery of templates from The Grove, Neuland, and ones we’ve designed ourselves. We got into Lynn’s head as she walks through her thinking process from the moment a client asks for a template to the delivery of the template. And then we walked through some bad templates and demonstrated how it can be made more effective. Participants shared their own client challenges where templates could benefit from a group process and then designed their own. Here’s Laura Green’s graphic recording of our session.

What were your highlights to this year’s conference? Looking forward to continuing the conversation throughout the year!

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People were literally in awe as you took their words, our words, our dreams and visions and wove them into a beautifully inspiring and uplifting mural. We were so impressed by how quickly you grasped what we were all about and which key items were worth giving “color” to! It is no surprise that people thought you knew Hebrew because it was clear to all who were present that the energy and currents in the room were being beautifully captured.

Hana GruenbergPlanning DirectorCoJIR

We took our Alumni Leadership Council’s annual retreat to another level with Graphic Footprint’s facilitation. Sophia’s ability to graphically capture our collaborative conversations in a meaningful way has allowed us to organize our initiatives in ways that we could never capture before. We would highly recommend her for any learning organizations that want to take their performance to another level.

Darren PittsPresidentAlumni Leadership Council Pepperdine University

Sophia is personable, professional, and detail-oriented. I remain amazed at her ability to capture the essence of a conversation in real-time with an impressive level of attention to detail. Her upbeat attitude coupled with her incredible artistic talents help to keep any group alive with creative thought and inspiration. She is fantastic about working through activity designs that has led to me changing the design of my activity to more closely achieve my goals.

Bill WelserDirectorRAND

I’ve had the pleasure of working with Sophia Liang on high level conferences for a major high tech company for the past two years. After doing extensive homework on graphic facilitators I presented six of what I deemed the best in the field. It was a hands down decision by my client to go with Sophia! For this year’s conference, booking her was a top priority and follow-up client communication described her recent work as “Amazing Sophia Drawings.” Not only is she a brilliant creative who masterfully translates spoken ideas and concepts in to visual maps, she is highly professional and a pleasure to work with.

Jim UsherProduction Vice PresidentTBA Global

I’ve worked with Sophia on multiple projects. Professional, highly skilled, collaborative and smart only begins to describe her capabilities. What Sophia does so well is literally capture the “big picture” and more importantly, the nuances of the conversation that led to it in a visually compelling way. I know firsthand that her art, powerful images of conversation and thinking, can be shared and studied to help drive any organization on a path to success.

Eric OkerstromVP, Strategy ManagementHagerty

Not only is Sophia a very talented visual facilitator, and truly innovative with using visuals to help groups collaborate, she is a truly gifted instructor. Sophia is always current on the theory behind what we do, gives a great deal of thought to the flow of a workshop and what a participant will be able to apply immediately to their own practice, and shines in front of the room. Since the very first workshop together, I’ve known she has a special talent for sharing what we do, in exercises, conversations, demonstrations that make anyone within hearing distance interested and excited in our craft.